June 17, 2015

Me outside of the
 Longyearbyen airport.

            I boarded a plane earlier this morning from Oslo and landed in Longyearbyen, Svalbard.  Before boarding our ship, we spent a few hours touring Longyearbyen; we stopped at a local museum which was interesting, though I spent more time talking to our tour-guide -- a Norwegian woman from the mainland who had moved to Svalbard three years ago in order to get closer to nature -- than I did looking at exhibits, which were largely in Norwegian.  We went to a local art gallery where a local painter had worked in semi-impressionistic landscapes of snow and mountains, perpetual light and perpetual darkness.  We toured the town which still looked like an old company mining town, its homogenous apartments painted in earth tones dictated by the local government.

 

 

The entire town of Longyearbyen -- population 2000.

 

            The custom in Longyearbyen is to never come inside any building with your shoes on.  Wherever we went we needed to wear socks or special inside shoes or fabric covers over our boots.

            After our tour we boarded the ship.  I'm sharing a room with two other teachers -- Doug and Dave.  Our cabins, B209 and B211, are connected and in the belly of the ship.  The rooms are small but they'll be comfortable.

My ship, the National Geographic Explorer.

            The view leaving the fjord, heading out to sea, was amazing.  Rugged black mountains, jagged, defiant, covered in snow.
            As I'm writing this, we've moved out more, closer to the ocean.  Mountains are to the port side but quite a ways off; flat dark ocean to the other side.  Perhaps a dozen seagulls are playing with the ocean, taunting it, their pure black shadows reaching up to kiss their white/gray bodies.  They fly faster than our ship -- effortlessly -- their wings sometimes a fraction of an inch from touching the surface.

June 18, 2015

            Awoke to the sound of ice scraping against the hull mere meters from my cabin porthole.

            Outside the ship is surrounded by ice.  Mountains border us on both sides and straight in front of us lies a gigantic glacier, ending at the sea and drifting off towards the horizon.
            It is gorgeous out: 4 degrees Celsius, no wind, and only four people besides myself taking in the view.

 

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            As I was eating breakfast we stopped because we spotted seals.  They are a ways off... perhaps 200 yards or more... little more than black dots, even with binoculars, like little specks of pepper dotting the ice fields around us.

 

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            Mountains reflecting down on a flat ocean, grays and whites and strange vibrant browns.  Everything is in doubles, the reflections punctuated with slushy ice that we cut through soundlessly.

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            Bigger ice now, blue upon blue, sounds like a shotgun in the distance as ice breaks apart.  We see an adult bearded seal lying on the ice, then a baby ringed seal, perhaps a few weeks old, maybe a meter long, lying on a chunk of ice hardly larger than his or her body.

            The sight is spiritual; it makes me physically warm.  I find myself smiling, making noises, cooing at the little seals cuteness.

 

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           We stop at a Kittiwake colony.  A rock face a thousand feet tall.  Every line on the face of the cliff, every crack where feet can find purchase, is filled w/ Kittiwakes.  It is a miracle that those in flight can find a free place to land.  It sounds like the opposite of thunder... constant high pitch undulations that fill everything.

            The land below the cliffs is a marine driven ecosystem -- birds eat fish from the sea, then they poop on the land, fertilizing the plants.  Algae and seaweed are swept into shore to decompose.
            There is no soil -- the ground is like a sponge.  The grass grows like a carpet that can be pealed away, examined, then put back, a web of interconnected roots over barren rocks, all fueled by bird poop and the corpses of Kittwakes.
            We see an arctic fox in the distance.  S/he blends in perfectly with the talus fields below the cliff.

June 19, 2015

    

        Overnight we sailed around the southern tip of Spitsbergen, heading east towards Edgeøya.  I drink my morning coffee on the bow, mountains in the distance on both sides.

 

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            We go to land and hike for a long while over the tundra.  We see a wide variety of birds: Brent Goose, Snow Bunting, Parasitic Skua.

            I become fascinated with the large amount of bones that litter the ground everywhere: seal, walrus, reindeer, whale.  I take pictures of the bones, my brain putting together a presentation for my students -- a walk through a world with no rodents, no insects, with permafrost below you, a world where the bones stay on the surface and do not decompose.  It's beautiful, if a little macabre.



Walrus Skull and Vertebrae

Whale Vertebrae

   







  

       We see our first reindeer, a male with tiny antlers.  His fur is an amazing white and his eyes a deep, charcoal black.  We also see our first Walrus -- humongous blubbery things.  They swim in a small bay while we sit and watch.  One of them has broken off part of his tusk.

 

 

 

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            We visited another Kittiwake colony at a place called Diskobukta.  The birds live on the walls of a canyon.  On the ground as we hiked in: two whale jaw bones, 30 feet long or more.  Reindeer greeted us, perhaps five of them, curious as to our presence.  As we approach the canyon, the skies are filled with thousands of birds.  The noise!  The smell!  The taste!  A random wing on the ground, the rest of the bird missing.  The decaying body of an arctic fox among the remains of multiple kittiwakes, his/her teeth showing in a snarl as the gums and lips pull back in decay.  Birds engaging in ariel combat-- locking together, falling straight down, recovering before they hit the ground.  Two fighters hit the crumbling slopes of the canyon and slide down them, finally disengaging and flying in opposite directions.

 

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            We saw our first bear perhaps a half hour ago (it is 11:39 pm right now).  S/he was far off in the distance -- through the binocs s/he was tiny, but it was amazing all the same.  S/he walked along the horizon, yellow and lumbering.  Pictures were futile, so I simply sat and watched.

 

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            The sea ice is the bluest it has been all day, at 12:39 AM.

June 20, 2015

 

            Today we mostly traveled and listened to presentations about polar bears and arctic travel.  The pack ice outside ranges in size from the size of an icecube to the size of a city bus.  The ocean slowly rolls below us, raising the ice together in gentle waves.  From time to time the whole ship shakes, booming like a gigantic drum as we strike a particularly large chunk of ice.

 

 

 

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A blue whale.

            Whales!  First we spot multiple great blue whales, the largest animal that has ever lived.  They were once driven extinct in this area because of whaling, so it is amazing to see them here.  They surface around us, blowing out air before diving again.  We can only see a small fraction of their bodies at a time, but even that amount is huge.

            Next we see fin whales (second largest animal on the planet) followed closely by a humpback.  The humpback is being trailed by a flock of kittiwakes -- we can tell where the whale will surface by watching the birds.  They lie quietly on the ocean surface watching, then altogether they take off, swarming in the same direction, coming down again on a patch of ocean just as the whales bumpy head breaks out of the water.  Small compared to the other two species, it's amazing to see his/her tail fly out as s/he dives again.

 

June 21, 2015

 

 

            Just saw our second bear.  We worked our way far north through the ice, well past the 80th parallel, until we hit the pack ice leading towards the pole.

            The bear was closer than the last one.  I took turns watching it through the binocs (huge, yellow, muscular, fat!) and trying to capture it on camera/video.  It's hard to explain the feeling in the air; I feel like I held my breath for 45 minutes, watching the bear as it lumbered along.  My body is still tingling.

 

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            This morning we kayaked with harbor seals in a cove that used to be an old whaling camp named Hamburgbukta.  (Old graves on the ground, collapsed buildings.)  It was great fun -- they swam close and seemed not to mind our presence.  The land around there was covered with deep moss and lichens, soft like a mattress.

 

 

            In the afternoon as we traveled north we cut our way through deep fog.  I stood alone on the bow for a long time, watching the white pass by.  It was beautiful.  At times you could just make out the blue sky above us and the sun shining down would cast a pale but beautiful rainbow right in front of our ship like a white and faintly colored halo.
            Tom, one of our naturalists, joined me out there after a while.  We talked about his job and the changes he'd seen (mostly in the Antarctic) as a result of climate change.

June 22, 2015

 

            This morning we visited a colony of guillemot.  The ship pulled right up to the face of a cliff, one that plunges deep into the sea.  Fog was everywhere, the ocean was black, and in front of us was a cliff around 200 feet in height.  Thousands of black-backed white-bellied birds were perched in groups across the face as far as we could see in the fog.  They were less screechy and less dense than the kittiwakes we saw earlier in the week, but still loud, and in the fog, completely amazing.

 

 

 

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            Another bear, this time a close encounter.  We first saw him from a great distance.  He was far back on the ice and we were a great distance back in the ocean.  We crept our way slowly forward towards the ice while he walked curiously in our direction.  Slowly, cautiously, we approached each other for what must have been at least a half an hour.  (Forty-five minutes?  An hour?  It was impossible to tell as the adrenaline seemed to slow time and the sun never moved.) Everyone on board was completely silent, worried that the slightest sound might spook him and send him back away from us across the ice.

            As he neared he came across the corpse of a bird which he ate as well as he could; the feathers seemed to stick in his mouth in a way that couldn't have felt pleasant.  After his small meal he came right up next to our ship.  He was big and beautiful and scarred yet a little skinny... I'm sure if I'd been standing on the ice next to him, I'd have been the next meal.
            We sat there together for (what felt like) a long while, him investigating the humans while the humans took pictures and stared.  Then, after a bit, he turned around and disappeared again, ambling off into the white.

 

 

June 23, 2015

            The energy on board today was celebratory; people seemed bonded over the close encounter from yesterday.

            We went aground again today, mostly viewing the plant life in the area.  It is amazing how complex the flora is, all while staying below an inch in height.  Even tiny willow trees, shorter than the tip of my pinky.  Purple saxifrage was blossoming everywhere.

 

            The big event for today was the "polar plunge" -- swimming, if you could call it that, in the arctic ocean.  I jumped in from the side of a zodiac and time stopped.  I didn't want to move because every twitch moved my body further through the freezing water.  I allowed myself to float to the surface; I'm sure it only took a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity.  People pulled me back on board as I flopped my way up, gasping, all sense of dignity or grace blown away by the intensity of the cold.

June 24, 2015

            We disembarked from the Explorer shortly after waking up.  It was sad to say goodbye, but the experience was lovely.

            Once again we toured Longyearbyen a bit before catching our plane.  The highlight was being able to stand next to the door leading into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.  Most amazing door ever!  It was moving to stand there on the side of a mountain, realizing that below the permafrost and stone lay a bank that holds millions of seeds representing hundreds of thousands of species of plants.  Moving to see such a beautiful memorial to humanity's ability to overcome regional differences in order to come together to help secure the future of our planet.  Truly amazing.

 

            In the afternoon our plane took us back to Oslo.  Weird to go a week without ever seeing a sunset.  Weird to be preparing to fly back home.  Beautiful though, and I look forward to being back in Lincoln.